I trained in South Africa and spent a year at Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital (UK) as a fellow. I am chair of the international forum for the British Association of Paediatric Surgeons and I'm personally developing paediatric surgery through a link in Tanzania and have collaborative research projects in Malawi and South Africa. I am the President of the Global Initiative for Children’s Surgery (GICS) that has followed on from the Lancet Commission.

I am editor of several books including a recent joint venture with my African colleague as editor to a text book namely "Paediatric Surgery: a comprehensive text for Africa" (publisher Springer). I have to date contributed to over 70 chapters to paediatric surgical text books and have over 300 peer reviewed publications.

Enhancing access to paediatric surgical care through collaboration

Professor Kokila Lakhoo talks about the impact of the Providers course for Children’s Surgery in the April 2019 issue of IndiaMedToday (pages 20-23). View the digital issue here.

I am a consultant paediatric surgeon at the Children’s Hospital in Oxford and the University of Oxford. Besides general paediatric surgery and ambulatory surgery, my special interests are: global health, fetal counselling, neonatal surgery, paediatric tumour surgery, paediatric thoracic surgery and specialist gastrointestinal surgery.

I undertake the following research projects:

• Piloting a newly designed perioperative checklist (Oxford-Tanzania link)
• Harnessing medical student power in global surgery research (Oxplore: Oxford Medical Students, Department of Paediatric Surgery and Global Paediatric Surgery)
• Tanzanian Tumour Project: a pilot investigating surgery-associated morbidity and mortality in children with intra-abdominal solid tumours (Oxford-Tanzania collaboration)
• Quality Improvement Project with medical officers (Oxford-Lilongwe Malawi collaboration)
• Carnegie Fellowship: developing a research hub in paediatric surgery (Oxford–Johannesburg, South Africa collaboration)
• South to South Training: soft funding to train paediatric surgeons from Africa in training hubs in Africa (Oxford-Africa project)
  
• Hub and spoke multi-disciplinary training of rural teams in India in children’s surgery (RCSENG-Vellore Project) - pictured below
  

I am involved as course organiser / faculty on the following paediatric surgery courses:

• Hugh Greenwood Neonatal Skills course - run by the British Association of Paediatric Surgeons
• Hugh Greenwood BAPS skills course for Neonatal Surgery - run every two years, attached to the Pan African Association of Pediatric Surgeons
• Hugh Greenwood Paediatric Surgical Skills Masterclass for General Surgeons -  this is run as a COSECSA FCS exam preparation course annually, led by Professor Eric Borgstein. The 2017 course was held at Mercy James Institute for Pediatric Surgery and Intensive Care (children's hospital in Blantyre set up by Madonna / Raising Malawi). Oxford faculty sponsor two COSECSA surgical trainees annually for this course. 2018 dates to be announced.